America today has become a country in decline, stupefied, paralyzed, and strangled with over-regulation of everything.
Long ago, 1930-1931, Americans built the Empire State Building, at the time the tallest building in the world in eighteen months. They put up the Golden Gate Bridge, then the longest and tallest suspension bridge and still the most beautiful, in four years, ahead of schedule and under budget.
It took thirteen years to replace the fallen World Trade Center.
My father bought a brand new Chevrolet for $1500 cash in 1960. Today, cars are loaded with so much safety crap, emissions nonsense, and electronic folderol, you can no longer work on them yourself and they cost a lot more than an ordinary house used to. A “cheap car” is priced in the low $40Ks.
Government controls everything and owns the whole natural world. Find an abandoned baby squirrel bring it home and save its life? Why! you have violated the law.
We’re like the Saxon peasants and our various levels of government do a fine job of playing our Norman overlords: Bad King Fed, your home state the local lord the wicked Sir Guy of Gisbourne, and your locality government the nefarious Sheriff of Nottingham. Rescue a baby squirrel and you’ve broken the king’s forest laws. We just have no Robin Hood.
Just about the whole (oppressed, Saxon portion of the) country is seething in indignation over the death of Peanut the Pet Squirrel at the hands of the bureaucracy of the State of New York.
John Carter did a great job of covering the whole Peanut story.
All this “We own the World” stuff from American government is simply an inevitable product of the Progressive Movement’s drive to empower via Government the credentialed managerial/professional class of “experts” to institutionalize, rationalize, regulate, and control absolutely everything.
In the old days, Americans, including Ben Franklin, quite commonly kept squirrels as pets.
John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
OneGuy
I stopped boating because of government over reach. You can’t even launch a boat without the sheriff water patrol doing a “safety” inspection. One time on a popular lake in California just two recreation boats on the lake and a sheriff boat. The other boat was pulling a water skier and as he passed by the skier making his back and forth movements came “too close” the sheriff’s boat. “To close” being undefined, I was watching and there was nothing close about it. The boat owner got a $400 ticket. Another time I took my drift boat to a river with a tidal effect where it reached the ocean. I timed it so I would be able to be in the water when the tide began to change so I could watch for a nice run of salmon (no I wasn’t fishing, that’s a who other story about government harassment). So I pushed out away from the put in to be out of the way and was essentially sitting on a gravel bar waiting for the incoming tide. A sheriff came down launched hi boat and of course came up to me to ask to see my fishing license. Ha, ha I’m thinking, got you, I’m not fishing. Noticably disappointed he began to turn away and then said how about you life jacket? Oh shit! Sure enough I forgot it so he wrote me a $100 ticket. Mind you I’m 60 years old not a child, old enough I think to make my own decisions AND I’m sitting on a gravel bar where the entire stream is no more than 6 inches deep anywhere. It’s well into Fall and hasn’t rained in three months or more so the river was barely flowing. And the sheriff had to fill a quota. I call it armed robbery.
Someone Else
Karen Przykiek looks like a fat Natasha.
Someone Else
I grew up in the sticks, a long time ago. Lots of people there would up with pretty raccoons, squirrels, deer… Now, if the Department of Natural Resources find out, they euthanize the animal. Automatically.
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